Topic
On missions and anti-missions
The Architect’s Dream , by Thomas Cole (1840) Not long after I announced my own $10,000 essay prize , coined as the “world’s largest _open 1 essay prize,” Elon launched his own: $1,000,000 for the best article on X . Immediate deflation. I did not expect the world’s richest man to suddenly champion…
read essay →I don't know if I buy the quote: "you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." (And this is coming from a systems guy.) It's a beautiful piece of rhetoric. The rise/fall structure. The humility to stay grounded. But I just think when you really want to make sense of how to pull off hard things, it should be a little complex, a little more than what can be packaged into a meme.
Two opposite things need to happen at once: top-down destiny forging, and bottom-up monk-like routines. It's a negotiation: "What will I want to complete in 100 days?" is a very different question from, "What should I be doing today?" and you can try to force alignment, but that's not always easy, because what you feel like doing often diverges.
The quote above simplifies this whole dance into a blind trust in systems. A system is a servant, not a master! I write this to remind myself as I'm immersed in probably one of the biggest system rebuilds in my life (one where I'm suddenly able to fluidly create the containers I work within) ...
It is wild to think that probably 50% of my computer use these days are within GUIs I've designed for myself. To me, liquid GUIs are a bigger deal than autonomous agents. My whole conception of what personal computing can be is changing very fast, and it becomes alluring, almost addicting, to continuously evolve my own OS, to see what's possible. It's very easy now to get tangled in knots of systems and software that are all very impressive, lead nowhere, and become chores. What leads to aliveness, to your intentions?
An emerging maxim for me is to start with the goal and let the system emerge around it; otherwise, you feel the cold of the infinite tinker, especially if you are quarantining in the attic from COVID and you can't go touch grass because there appear to feet of snow outside and you are too achey to shovel out your car to go anywhere and so one way to relax when you're sick is to live-clone all incoming Substack posts into local JSON folders and redesign a better algorithm. But to what end?
Maybe this has been written to death, but as much as I've thought about this, my "twelve favorite problems" feel underdeveloped. I have spent a decent amount of time on these heavy, paradoxical, lifelong problems (the ones that should be the arrow of my essay practice), but there are gaps.
For example, I already have a list of 21 idiosyncratic problems, and I think they’re worded with the right level of specificity and memorability, but I wasn’t too rigorous in how I qualified something to make the list. If I’ve thought about it a lot, still care about it, and can imagine myself caring about until I die, than it makes the cut.
What I’ve neglected is how to use my list of problems to steer my life. I mean, the entirety of Essay Architecture, a multi-prong institution to preserve and advance the essay, is just 1 of the 21 problems! There are other pressing problems, like how to "fix" Christianity, how to design institutions for psychedelic therapy, how to revive Hermeticism, how to turn my logs into an AI consciousness, how to make literary video games, etc. Maybe a life can only be seriously dedicated to 2 or 3 problems.
(I have joked with friends about creating a kind of kill switch that spawns an AI consciousness of myself that is agentic and whose sole purpose is to “solve my favorite problems,” and then when it eventually does (after 300-500 years), it self-terminates.)
If I had to break my “favorite problems” list into categories, one possible scheme is { soul, relationships, art, civics }, each relating to a different dimension of your death. That feels like the right order. Your soul effects every dimension of your life, and is the thing you bring to an afterlife (which I mythologize as a 3-minute DMT odyssey that dilates time to the point where it feels like a 30,000 year dream). The other three affect the material world after you leave it: the effect you have on people, the art/works you leave behind, the civic structures that survive (if any, ofc). All of these have a spirit of “all that matters is what lives on after your death,” but also the opposite is true: “all that matter is this moment.” I think you have to straddle that spectrum, taking both ends seriously, and ruthless prune any middle-level concerns, your goals for the month.
My WIP list of questions: